Better Office

Most office workers and managers spend a lot of their day using their common office software such as word processing, spreadsheeting, presentations and email clients. In fact if you throw in web browsing then you could account for over 90% of computer time in the average office. A few hints and shortcuts could easily help most workers gain a few minutes each day and save plenty of frustration.

Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

Simple and common commands usually have keyboard shortcuts and this will speed up your operation by reducing the number of times that you have to switch to the mouse as the input device. Some common examples are:

Ctrl + A – Select all contents of the page.

Ctrl + B – Bold highlighted selection.

Ctrl + C – Copy selected text.

Ctrl + X – Cut selected text.

Ctrl + P – Open the print window.

Ctrl + F – Open find box.

Ctrl + I – Italic highlighted selection.

Ctrl + K – Insert link.

Ctrl + U – Underline highlighted selection.

Ctrl + V – Paste.

Ctrl + Y – Redo the last action performed.

Ctrl + Z – Undo last action.

Ctrl + ENTER – Force new Page

SHIFT + HOME/END – Selects from cursor to beginning/end of the line

Use Styles

By using the built in styles to structure your documents users gain many advantages. The most obvious is that the document will have a consistent look and feel and document wide changes can easily be made at a later date.

Another less obvious advantage is that the document will be more accessible to readers who need to rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies. The styles such as Heading levels (1-6 typically) can also be used to navigate the document using the Navigation Bar. Sections can be re-arranged and ordered with a simple drag and drop of the items in the Navigation Nar.

Lastly the structure of the heading levels also allows a table of contents to be generated, which can dynamically adjust to changes.

Page Layout can also be adjusted for a single created section. A common example of this is changing page orientation from portrait to landscape for particular sections or pages.

Tools

Office generally offers you a great suite of extra tools which many people do not take advantage of. Some examples include dictionary, thesaurus, statistics, grammar checkers etc

In spreadsheets you can utilise formulas for calculations, conditional formatting, duplication checking and data manipulation.

Powerpoint offers an amazing array of diagrams and drawing tools. These can be used and the results exported and used in your Word and Excel documents also or as stand alone images.

Email, Calendar and Tasks

Much of the work day is spent dealing with communication via email, tasks and calendar entries.

By using the powerful folder structure in Outlook with Smart Folders you can have dynamically automatic filing, which makes finding information and decreasing inbox clutter much easier. They consist of searches that are constantly run putting emails into specific folders. Rules also allow you to file as well as forward, copy and reply to emails.

Categories allow tasks and calendar items to be colour coded and sorted as well as flags being added to produce reminders and follow-up actions.

Collaboration

All of the major office suites are moving to strengthen collaboration features with most moving to live collaboration and cloud storage. This means that in documents, many users can simultaneously edit and produce the work with changes and reviews recorded.

With documents and calendars its crucial to explore all of the sharing options to ensure smooth interaction with your teams. Calendars can be easily shared with one or more people.

V2 have worked with us to move our training from 100% face to face and paper based to a great mix of online and face to face. Students are loving it and so are we!

StephenTraining Manager

I have worked with David over many years. More recently he has been instrumental in setting up an online course for our school. David has done an outstanding job of taking our concept and making it a reality. He is both creative and approachable and I have no hesitation in recommending him for future projects.